Syllabus Errorum

George Weigel

God's Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and
the New World Order. By David Willey. St. Martin's. 258 pp. $18.95.

Fifteen years ago, as the long pontificate of Paul VI drew to a close,
a consensus on the qualifications for the next pope began to take shape
among liberal Catholic opinion-makers. The new pope should be a vigorous,
confident leader: at home in the modern world, a man of deep spirituality,
conversant with contemporary intellectual life, an activist rather than
a recluse, an adept publicist, a Christian who radiated hope-in short,
a charismatic figure who could revitalize the public face of Roman Catholicism
at the end of the twentieth century. The new pope should also be a man
of the Second Vatican Council, committed to securing the Council's teaching
in the thought and practice of the Church. Building on the wayfaring innovations
of Paul VI, the new pope should escape the gilded cage of the Vatican and
bring the Gospel message to the nations: what the Church and the world
needed, it was thought, was more an apostle than a CEO of Roman Catholic
Church, Inc. Ideally, the new pope would have extensive pastoral experience,
and, longest of all long shots, he should be non-Italian.

All of which is precisely what the College of Cardinals gave us on
October 16, 1978, when, after the brief "September papacy" of
Albino Luciani, it elected Karol J"zef Wojtyla, the archbishop of
Krak"w, as the 263rd successor of Peter as Bishop of Rome.

Why, then, have Catholic liberals been so unenthusiastic, to put it
gently, about this papacy and this pope?

Little direct light is shed on that question by God's Politician,
alas. David Willey, the BBC's correspondent in Rome since 1972, has accompanied
John Paul II on many of his pastoral pilgrimages abroad. Yet rarely has
the old saw-"travel narrows the mind"-been vindicated more completely
than in this sour, indeed mean- spirited, book. The more of John Paul Mr.
Willey sees, the less he likes-indeed, in an act of extraordinary chutzpah
(even for a journalist), our cradle Catholic author confesses, in his prologue,
that while his "faith in God is intact," his "allegiance
to the Roman Catholic Church has been suspended" while he "examine[s]
this brief Polish interlude in its long history."

David Willey's (mis)understanding of the Church is succinctly captured
in a single sentence toward the end of his book: the Church is "a
hierarchical organization run by ecclesiastics who are more interested
in the application of rules than in kindling the religious convictions
of their faithful." Given that lens, Willey's vision of John Paul's
"bulldozer papacy" follows predictably enough. John Paul is a
supremely gifted actor whose charming exterior masks his "inquisitorial
and totalitarian methods," which are deployed in the service of his
"implacable hostility to theological innovation," his determination
to "stifle dissent among theologians and bishops," and his relentless
opposition to the notion that "the Roman Catholic Church [has] a social
and political role to play in helping peoples free themselves from oppressive
regimes and social injustice."

But then, what are we to expect of a pope for whom "humility was
never [a] distinguishing mark," a pastor who, "at a minimum personal
security risk . . . passed by some of the most wretched and overcrowded
slums in the world" while "cocooned behind the bulletproof windows
of the papal limousine"? After all, this is a pope who still exhibits
a bizarre "attachment to [the] quaint ceremonies and customs"
of Polish "folk Catholicism"; little wonder that John Paul, the
pope of the "iron fist," has "tended to deny those new freedoms"
promised by Vatican II. And, as if this were not enough to seal the indictment,
there is Willey's offended professional amour propre: "Wojtyla neither
likes nor trusts the media. He finds its values shallow and its behavior
intrusive. . . . He is usually disappointed by journalists. He cannot see
why they should not be glad to act as evangelizers."

To call God's Politician "tendentious" is to praise
it too highly. For not only is our BBC correspondent given to the most
extreme forms of ideological spin-doctoring, he can't even get the facts
straight. Facts small and facts large are treated with similar insouciance.
David Willey doesn't seem to know that the Soviet secret police were the
"KGB." He misdates a crucial exchange of correspondence between
Nikita Khrushchev and John XXIII by two years. He states, flatly, that
Mikhail Gorbachev was the head of a "post-Communist Soviet Union."
He thinks the "Internationale" was the Soviet national anthem.
He mistakenly insists (twice) that John Paul II has "set up"
a "Latin rite diocese" in Moscow. He confuses the Ark and Kolbe
churches in Nowa Huta, the steel-milling suburb of Krak"w. He misstates
the ecclesiastical ranks of the secretary of state of the Holy See, the
archbishops of Prague and Managua, the bishop of Gdansk, and a prominent
Roman theologian. He understates the Communist count of Czechoslovak
pilgrims at a great 1985 rally in Velehrad in Moravia by 200 percent. He
misstates the authorship of the great petition for religious freedom in
Czechoslovakia that eventually drew some 600,000 signatures in the years
before the Velvet Revolution. He misstates (by seventeen years) the date
on which Nicolae Ceausescu became leader of Romania. He believes, somehow,
that Asia is "predominantly Muslim." He writes of Pope Pius XI
in 1847-which happens to be ten years before Pius XI was born. He confuses
the millennium of Polish Christianity with the 900th anniversary of the
death of St. Stanislaw [Stanislaus], and then compounds the error by talking
about the "950th anniversary." But it is when ideology rears
its ugly head that David Willey's sloppiness runneth over: thus he hits
the trifecta of errors in one sentence about Hans Kung, writing that the
"German priest and theologian" (wrong) had been disciplined by
the "Holy Office" (wrong) because he had "brought into discussion"
the doctrine of papal infallibility (wrong).

Willey does give the pope credit for igniting the Revolution of 1989
in Poland; but beyond that concession to reality, God's Politician is of
little use in understanding the pontificate of John Paul II. And while
the book does illuminate, along the classic via negativa, certain facets
of the current "progressive" Catholic funk, one hardly needs
to spend twenty bucks and 240 pages revisiting those chronic complaints.
Still, an interesting question remains: fifteen years into a papacy that,
God willing, bids fair to extend into the third Christian millennium, why
do people like David Willey (and the people who will take God's Politician
seriously) have such a terribly difficult time with John Paul II?

I suggest that at least four factors are in play here. First, and at
the most vulgar level, there is the matter of the pope's politics. John
Paul II has been a sign of contradiction to Catholic "progressives"
and to the journalistic establishment that feeds on the Catholic left and
its discontents because he has refused to concede to fashionable opinion
on the lifestyle issues that occupy such a large part of the contemporary
gauchiste political agenda: abortion, euthanasia, "gay rights,"
"alternative marriage," and so forth. Thus David Willey devotes
an entire chapter to deploring what he regards as the Pope's culpable indifference
to the "world population bomb," but seems blithely unaware that
his own sources on these matters-Worldwatch Institute, the United Nations
Population Fund, the World Bank-are hardly to be regarded as purveyors
of "value-neutral" analysis. (Willey even quotes, without comment,
the claim by the deputy minister for family planning in Beijing that the
notorious Chinese population-control program is "based upon education
and voluntary acceptance of the country's true needs, not coercion.")

On other fronts, one might have expected that a pope who had helped
his flock confront (indeed, overturn) the regimes of Marcos, Pinochet,
and Stroessner would have earned some credits from political liberals.
But John Paul's implacable anticommunism and his insistence that politics
is an exercise in ethics have made him a deeply suspicious character even
when, by prevailing establishment standards, he "does the right thing."
Thus the discussion of the Revolution of 1989 in his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus
Annus, while challenging certain realist assumptions about the nature
of international politics and the causes of the Communist crack-up, contained
an even sharper (if largely implicit) criticism of ideological detentists
and others on the Western left who lost sight of the moral catastrophe
of communism during the last decades of the Cold War.

The politics of John Paul II have in fact been remarkably consistent.
John Paul II enters the world of affairs, not as a diplomat, but as a pastor
for whom the God-given human dignity of each member of the human family
is a pressing concern. Or, as he put it himself during a flying press conference
en route to South America in 1987, "I am not the evangelizer of democracy,
I am the evangelizer of the Gospel. To the Gospel message, of course, belong
all the problems of human rights, and if democracy means human rights it
also belongs to the message of the Church." But it is not the Republic
of Procedures and the Imperium of the Autonomous Self that John Paul has
in mind when he talks about "democracy"; rather, it is a democracy
that holds itself accountable to the "truth about man"-a truth
which, against the grain of the times, John Paul insists we can know.

At another level (and as amply illustrated by God's Politician),
the liberal problem with John Paul II is shaped by a liberal caricature
of Polish Catholicism: a caricature, it should be noted, that was vigorously
promoted by the propagandists of Poland's Communist regime. According to
this burlesque view, the Polish Church is irremediably authoritarian, not-quite-in-touch-with
"the spirit of Vatican II," excessively (even idolatrously) Marian
in its piety-and, when you get right down to it, just a little dumb. But
one need not romanticize the Polish experience of Catholicism in the twentieth
century to understand just how grossly inadequate a portrait of a complex
reality that parody is.

The Polish episcopate practiced collegiality (to be sure, under the
firm leadership of Cardinal Stefan Wyszy'nski) years before the Second
Vatican Council. The Krak"w-based Tygodnik Powszechny ("Universal
Weekly") maintained a level of publishing excellence throughout the
Communist period that any American or British Catholic journal would be
proud to claim-and under far more difficult circumstances. Viewed from
a more sympathetic angle, Polish Catholicism's Marian piety is in fact
a striking example of successful "inculturation": 300 years before
the ecclesiastical chattering classes knew there was such a thing. (Why
do people who applaud the experimental Zairean liturgy find the Black Madonna
so hard to take?) And as for the charge that the Church now seeks to impose
a "black totalitarianism" in the aftermath of "red totalitarianism,"
the truth is that the Polish hierarchy today is engaged in a great debate,
which far transcends the usual liberal/conservative categories, over the
role(s) of the Church in consolidating Polish democracy; and if the disagreements
that exist (and they can be fierce) are not displayed for all the world
to see, well, that may be because the Polish bishops think that collegiality
implies not trashing your brother bishops in the pages of the New Yorker.

Then there is Polish Catholic intellectual life: an oxymoron, as far
as David Willey and "progressive" Catholics are concerned. It
is really quite striking that a pope who is, by any measure, a world-class
intellectual has been dealt with so cursorily at that level of analysis.
For beyond George Huntston Williams' The Mind of John Paul II: Origins
of His Thought and Action, which was published a dozen years ago, there
has been precious little serious American (or English- speaking) examination
of John Paul II as a philosopher and theologian. Nor has the pope's ongoing
involvement with the development of phenomenology and the impact of that
involvement on his moral teaching and on the new empirical sensitivity
about development economics demonstrated in Centesimus Annus been
very carefully analyzed. As a philosopher, John Paul II is, admittedly,
not a very easy read. But people prepared to plow through Rawls and Rorty,
Foucault and Fish, Dworkin, Derrida, and MacKinnon ought to be willing
to make at least some effort to understand the intellectual project of
the world's most influential religious and moral teacher: unless, that
is, people have succumbed to the lurking suspicion that there just may
be something to all those jokes about "dumb Polacks."

In the fourth place, John Paul II has offended "progressive"
sensibilities by insisting that Catholicism remains a communion capable
of giving a coherent and authoritative account of the "hope that is
within [us]" (1 Peter 3:5). Thus the new Catechism of the Catholic
Church, which the Holy Father calmly and persistently proclaims as
an authentic fruit of the Second Vatican Council, has been subjected to
a continuous stream of disapprobation, even ridicule, from American Catholic
intellectuals, some of whom have publicly denied that such a compendium
of belief is even possible "these days." (The ridicule has not
been limited to our shores, of course; David Willey admiringly cites Leonardo
Boff on the catechism, the Brazilian wondering "what exotic Roman
Catholic being is going to be capable of creating a text equally applicable
to the Eskimos of the Arctic, the destitute of Bangladesh, the German business
tycoons of Bavaria, the Yuppies of New York, and the Xavante Indians of
Brazil." So much for the universality of the Good News. Meanwhile,
the catechism is selling like mad in France. France!)

And here, one suspects, is the root of the progressives' discontent
with this papacy: it is not so much discontent with John Paul II (although
he is surely to be regretted) as with the very idea of an authoritative
teaching tradition, embodied in an ecclesial magisterium, capable of defining
the boundaries of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, and convinced that there is
a direct relationship between truth and freedom. John Paul II, the pope
who acts like a pope, is thus "hard to understand"-a man who,
in David Willey's judgment, "presides over a less and less tolerant
Catholic Church." The great sadness here, of course, is the radical
disjunction in the progressive mind between authoritative truth claims
and tolerance: you can't have both. But the progressive mind waffles even
on that point, for it certainly honors the authoritative truth claims of
"women's rights" advocates and the United Nations Population
Fund. It does seem to be a matter of whose truth is being gored.

The National Catholic Reporter's Peter Hebblethwaite, who made
"many valuable suggestions" to our BBC correspondent, recently
informed readers of the 1993 Britannica Book of the Year that "uncertainty
about the pope's health . . . suggested that his pontificate was entering
its final phase." One suspects, with little fear of offending against
charity, that the wish is the father of the thought here. And while no
one knows precisely what God has in mind for Karol J"zef Wojtyla,
it does not appear that the world is any less in need of a pope who will
boldly preach, as John Paul has done from the day of his inauguration,
"Be not afraid! Open the doors to Christ!" And, oh yes, the Holy
Father was seen skiing this past Christmas season, six months after his
colon surgery. Alas for Willey and Hebblethwaite (but happily for many,
many others), they may have John Paul II to kick around for a whole lot
longer.

George Weigel's most recent book is The
Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism.